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Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Beijing – Tienanmen Square and Temple of Heaven

For our last day in Beijing, we finally made our way down to Tienanmen Square. It was pretty anticlimactic and boring. Like many famous squares we've been to, it just didn't look like much. We debated going into the Mao Mausoleum, where you can see Mao's mummified body on display in a glass casket, a la Sleeping Beauty. Yes. Seriously. I'm not making this up. Josh wanted to do it. Mary was afraid she wouldn't be able to keep a straight face or avoid cracking jokes, and who knows what kind of trouble that could get you into in China. However, it wasn't open.

Next we went down to the Temple of Heaven, where we saw the local people playing cards, something like hacky-sack, and musical instruments in the park area. Josh joined a group for hacky-sack for a while.

In the temple area, we got to see the iconic round temples, and the round echo wall, and great hordes of tourists. Like so many other places in China, we were only allowed to see the buildings from the outside, and peer into the darkened interiors for a moment while being jostled by the crowds. From what Lonely Planet had to say, the buildings were pretty interesting, but we'll have to take their word for it. Our patience with crowds has been on the decline all trip, with us increasingly finding the smaller sights we have to ourselves more gratifying than the more famous tourist destinations: even though, crowds aside, the more famous destinations clearly got that way for a reason.

We had wanted to also go to the Beijing Underground, a vast underground city built by hand during the Cold War for the people to live in after the nuclear fallout. Boy does this ever sound like something from an old science fiction movie? Doctor Strangelove perhaps? We were very disappointed to learn from the guys who gave us our ride home from the Great Wall that it is closed indefinitely. We called to verify and got no answer. Instead we went back to our hostel and played pool and chatted with other travelers while we waited for it to be time to go to the airport for our red-eye flight to Cairo. We need to spend more time on this trip relaxing.